realestate

It’s easy to remember to tackle things like exercise, diet and business goals, but what about resolutions for your home? By Erica Reitman, HGTV.com We’re a few weeks into the new year, and you’re likely pretty committed to your personal resolutions. But why not think through some design and project-based resolutions that you can work toward in your home this year, too? Here are 10 of our faves.

Stylish and classic, the gorgeous subway tile backsplash trend is here to stay. But we have just the thing to set your kitchen apart. By Keri Sanders, HGTV.com More From HGTV.com: 15 Creative Kitchen Backsplashes You Haven’t Considered 20 Dreamy Kitchen Islands Before + After: 20 Incredible Small Bathroom Makeovers

Don’t sabotage your home sale with outdoor decor that turns buyers off before they’ve even walked through the door. By Gretchen Roberts, HGTV.com More From HGTV.com: 15 Before-and-After Curb Appeal Makeovers 10 Curb Appeal Tips From the Pros QUIZ: What Color Should You Paint Your Front Door?

Kendrick Lamar, deemed “arguably the most talented rapper of his generation” by Rolling Stone last year when he was 27, has written and spoken often of growing up in the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, which just this past weekend awarded him the Key to the City. It’s six blocks from Tam’s Burgers — “where I seen my second murder, actually,” he told Rolling Stone. Dude was in the drive-thru ordering his food, and homey ran up, boom boom — smoked him.” (Tam’s is the same restaurant where Suge Knight is said to have run over two men in the parking lot.) The house has three bedrooms and two bathrooms in 1,200 square feet, and it’s up for rent at $1,895 a month. “It’s a hell of a neighborhood,” one old-timer told Rolling Stone.

The two-bedroom cottage is part of the Warren Place Mews, a block of 34 small homes threaded together in Cobble Hill. They were originally established as workingman’s homes, or the equivalent of today’s affordable housing.

If you showed us the Moody Nest, a combination sofa-blanket from Frankfurt-based designer Hanna Ernsting, last week, we would have thought it was a little silly. But after this weekend, well, we still think it's silly. But also we...

This $1.2 million California house is a castle, and the listing makes no qualms about it. The four-bedroom, five-bathroom home’s exterior certainly looks like a castle, and the San Lorenzo River wraps around it almost like a moat. Inside, many of the rooms look downright Medieval–except for the strikingly bland, modern kitchen–and many include a few castle props like swords, statues and coats of arms. The home was built in 1927 by its owner Robert Howden, hence its name, and has been a local tourist attraction ever since.

If you entered into adulthood after 2008, you probably became accustomed to thinking your cash savings are more likely to grow when safely tucked under your mattress than in most bank accounts, and that interest rates on auto loans and other loans are set in the single digits. While the interest rate hike was certainly on the low end, it signals a shift for consumers — one that makes maintaining a high credit score even more of a priority going forward. While interest rates on auto loans didn’t see an immediate jump with the Federal Reserve’s announcement, future increases will eventually hit consumers in noticeable ways.

When budget is the most important consideration in designing and building a home, economy tends to outweigh aesthetics and even usability. But with ‘MYZ Nest’, a house inspired by animal nests, Japanese architecture firm no.555 has proven that even small and humble residences can be thoughtful and visually interesting.

Bad news: workers found that bedroom you made for yourself in an abandoned tunnel in the Berlin subway system during a routine fire inspection and took a bunch of pictures and sent them them to the Berliner Zeitung. While...

No one has to tell Ellen Sims that Seattle rents aren’t affordable. The massage therapist and nonprofit executive knows firsthand that for many people, it’s impossible to pay rent here and get ahead. That’s why she extracted herself from the rent race a year ago, plunking $2,000 down on a recreational vehicle that now costs her a manageable $240 a month — plus roughly $300 in insurance, propane and gas, depending on the season and her travel plans. ...

Justin Mateen, co-founder of Tinder, is hoping someone will be willing to splurge on a $15,000-per-month relationship with his house in Beverly Hills, CA. The post Swipe Right? Tinder Co-Founder Justin Mateen Renting Out His Beverly Hills Home appeared first on Real Estate News and Advice - realtor.com.

Turn down for what? Put on your best party hat, as we examine the week's most popular homes on realtor.com®, topped by a luxe remodel in the Big Easy. The post This Week’s Most Popular Home Is a Party Pad in New Orleans appeared first on Real Estate News and Advice - realtor.com.

Numbers just released by RealtyTrac indicate that for most challenged housing markets, the problem is tight supply. But in a few metro areas, the vacancy rate is still far above the overall nation’s — almost five times worse in Flint, Michigan, for example.

For all the talk of “zombie foreclosures” and abandoned homes that have so recently plagued the nation, “the challenge facing most U.S. real estate markets is not too many vacant homes but too few,” says RealtyTrac Vice President Daren Blomquist.

In typically understated British fashion, the listing describes this Kentish home — created from two towers of a former water-softening plant, with amenities that include “hand-crafted concrete beds and baths” — as “highly individual.” It’s asking 1.5 million pounds, or more than $2 million at current exchange rates. The home’s four levels are linked by spiral staircases, with six bedrooms and six “bath/shwer rooms” — the master suite occupying the full top floor.

What do you do after you move a football team to Los Angeles, becoming the most hated man in your home state of Missouri in the process? Apparently, you buy a $725 million ranch in a different state. That...

Built in 1989, this Cape Cod hilltop property is hard to miss: The home comprises three octagons, or, as Curbed puts it, a “giant upside down Mickey Mouse head” when viewed from above. Just shy of an acre on the waterfront in Eastham, Massachusetts, the octagons enclose about 4,600 square feet of living space, including four bedrooms and five bathrooms. The great room earns its name, with soaring ceilings and wide views of “ocean, marsh and cove,” the listing says — and “retained perpetual view easements over abutting properties ensure enjoyment of the dramatic panorama for generations to come.” More on Yahoo Real Estate: • A-Frames Under $50,000 (66 photos) • Boring Suburban Facade Hides Outrageous Interior – to Fool the Tax Man (47 photos) • Tiny Private Paradise of an Island Eases You Into Off-Grid Living (54 photos

For $10 per night, you can stay in artist Vincent Van Gogh’s room. Van Gogh is renting out his “Bedroom in Arles” in Chicago this month. It’s a completely real bedroom, with working bathroom, designed to look exactly like the artist’s painting of his bedroom at 2, Place Lamartine in Arles, Bouches-du-Rhône, France (also known as his Yellow House). Posing as Van Gogh, the Art Institute of Chicago is behind the rental, which is promoting an upcoming exhibit where all three versions of Van Gogh’s “Bedroom in Arles” paintings will be displayed together for the first time, along with 30 other works by the artist.

By Bianca Barragan Dead or dying wildlife, from bobcats to owls, are popping up all around Dos Vientos, a neighborhood in Thousand Oaks, California, and locals are snapping photos of the awful-looking creatures and sharing them on Facebook. Outraged locals are pointing the finger at the rodenticides that are (or were) being employed at the behest of the neighborhood association—the gradual sickening of the local wildlife is “the unintended collateral damage of the Dos Vientos Ranch Community Assn.’s annual $40,000 war on rats,” says the Los Angeles Times. The kind of rodenticide that could harm coyotes or bobcats (and that famously sickened the Griffith Park Mountain Lion) is what’s called a second-generation anticoagulant rodenticide. This is the rat poison that made the Griffith Park Mountain Lion P-22 look mangy, rough, and near-death a couple years ago, causing Glendale to switch up its rat-poisoning approach.

Noted American architect Judith Chafee, the first woman from Arizona to be named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), specialized in residential design combining modern touches with more traditional desert styles. Now, the most well known of the bunch, the 1975-built Ramada House in the Sonoran Desert, has come on the market for $2.6 million. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the roughly 3,800-square-foot residence is distinguished by the large wooden ramada it’s named after, which serves to both shade the house and generate a ventilating breeze – in his book “Modern Architecture Since 1900,” English critic William J.R. Curtis praised Chafee for sensing that the building needed a “big hat in the desert.” Full of striking windows framing views of the Catalina Mountains, city lights, and desert landscape, deserts, and city, the four-bedroom Tucson home is fully integrated into its surroundings.